Nike Buyers Want to Shop On-line, Facebook Messenger Wants to Help You & Alphabet Wants to Store Energy Using Salt

People are keener on buying Nike on Amazon than at Foot Locker
According to a report by UBS, more US consumers prefer to purchase Nike products on Amazon (13%), rather than making the purchase at Foot Locker (9%). The recent findings indicate a significant switch from a year ago, when Foot Locker was the option more people chose.

Nike was wary of opening a store on Amazon over concerns of counterfeits being sold and the customer experience being poor, but the sports apparel manufacturer caved and announced a deal with Amazon, which sent the shares flying 7%.

In order to gain more control over their sales, Nike is looking to increase the direct sales through their website. Nike’s objective is to increase their direct e-commerce sales by $5 billion or, as estimated by UBS, 30% of planned group sales growth.

Facebook’s Messenger to become smarter
Facebook announced on Monday that it has acquired a developer of a virtual assistant app for iOS and Android– Ozlo. Reportedly, the recently acquired startup has been everything but popular, having been installed only around 500-1000 times on Android.

Users of the Facebook Messenger already have the possibility to interact with numerous chatbots, yet Facebook is looking to get even more businesses to utilize AI in order to communicate with their customers.

Reportedly, Facebook has been testing its own assistant, available to a limited number of users and has already made some of the components available to the public.

Lately, the interest in AI has definitely seen an increase in interest, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon as well as Microsoft have made investments in AI to improve their services.

Alphabet looking to store energy with salt
Did you know that only in the first half of this year, California threw out more than 300’000 megawatts of electricity generated by solar panels and wind turbines, because there was no way to store it? To put it into perspective, 300’000 megawatts would be enough to send Doc Brown and Marty through the flux capacitor more than 240 times, or for those not familiar with science fiction, such an amount electricity is able to power tens of thousands of homes.

Alphabet, more specifically its subsidiary “X”, is looking to solve this problem with the development of a new way of storing energy – project Malta. Currently a team of fewer than ten researchers is working on the prototype, however, the project is soon to become an official project of X and partners are being sought to build a commercial-sized prototype.